Here is where I detail my adventures in real estate. It's meant for people who want to get into this investment area but need some encouragement, help, or just a general push in the right direction. Hopefully, by detailing all my experiences, you'll see it's really not that difficult or scary.

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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

I've been away for a couple weeks on a cruise to Hawaii. Got back and found out my hard money loan #22 finally got paid off. This was 5 months overdue, but since the borrower is one of our biggest clients and he was still making payments on time, we didn't call the note and opted to let him pay it off at his leisure. The property was under contract for sale two or three times, but fell out of escrow each time, I believe because the buyer's lender would not consider this a valid property for a conforming loan. The unit was a triplex and those are normally considered conforming (i.e. non-commercial), but apparently in this post-real estate bubble world, lenders are being more strict in what they define as conforming. Our client ended up keeping the property himself and renting it out. He did a re-fi to pay us off. I'll be adding some money to the principle return from this loan and am looking for a new property to loan on.

My other three hard money loans continue to pay on time.

The financial results for January for the Houston apartment complex came in. The property showed a loss of about $6,500 for the month. This is very disappointing, considering how things appeared to be turning around in December. The silver lining is that the loses in January were due to one-time expenses. We had to pay a vendor almost $4,000 for work done 4 to 5 months ago (we had been delaying paying the vendor until the property's cashflow improved), there was a bed bug infestation that required pest control treatment costing close to $1,000, and several fees related to health and fire permits and loan reserves processing by our lender were paid. We had to replace a hot water boiler that failed, although this $14,000 cost will be reimbursed from our capital improvements escrow account with the lender. If you exclude the boiler and one-time items, cashflow would have been a positive $11,000 for the month.

February's figures should be coming in soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how things went that month.